system x, x3550 m3, LSI SAS 1068E, ibm 7944

I have just got a used IBM x3550 M3 server as development machine and ran into some trouble when trying to add some SSDs: the throughput was pretty slow (~100MB/s). Generally the BR10i controller supports 3G SATA2 and therefore i expected a throughput of ~250MB. I’ve figured out, that this behaviour is caused by the firmware of the LSI based RAID Controller BR10i which is fixed in v1.30.10.00. You can get the latest firmware package from IBM Fix Central (requires a developer account) but in case you are running ubuntu, you cannot install it directly, because this OS is not officially supported and the IBM tools are designed for Windows or RHEL.

But there is a simple solution out there: you can use the LSI OEM tools to update the firmware on Ubuntu!

There are 3 important files in this package: uefi_3.16.00.06.rom, 0394_b3_02d28_1.30.10.fw, 0394_c0_02d28_1.30.10.fw – pay attention to the controller revision C0 or B3. The update tool will also check the revision before uploading, so it is not possible to break the card with a wrong firmware!